If you take the *really* long view, the Internet is the first global change agent to appear on the distributed computing platform called the PC. This change agent has been 20 years in the making, and its effects create a sea change.

An evolution Once we could digitize data, we began to decentralize the power of information via the desktop computer. Beginning in the early 80s, we put that power into the hands of the people to calculate (VisiCalc, Lotus), to communicate (WordPerfect, MSWord), to categorize (DBase), and to visualize (graphics programs). These software applications were tools, really, the basic functionality of the PC.

We called these tools "killer apps" in their time, the time of building personal computing standards and infrastructure (see "Handling the Curves: The Science of Shakeouts and Adoption," SAR/DCR, October 1998). We removed computing power from the MIS directors and put it into the control of the individual. Remember the early MAC ads? "The computer for the rest of us." This was the first wave of the sea change which now engulfs us.

Chip technology became more powerful. Data storage became increasingly inexpensive. Compression technologies in the 90s brought us more complete ways to communicate as sound and video were added to text and graphics.

When Americans and Russians raced into space, satellites were built in the 60's and 70's for space missions, high tech espionage and Cold War defense, and these satellites filled the sky with communications devices spanning and circling and connecting the world.

An unusual alliance occurred between the oil & gas industry and the telecommunications business. The gas industry constructed the country's first fiberoptics backbone, originally used to monitor pipeline gas leaks. Wide pipes with lots of fiberoptics were laid across the country. But many of the fiberoptics within each pipeline were left dormant and never used for monitoring. So the telecommunications industry leased the unused fiberoptics and built a nationwide infrastructure for digital communication.

Likewise, the infrastructure of black boxes and cable wire was built by the cable companies for television transmission. Now the cable industry uses these wires for digital telephone and cable modem transmission as well. A convergence These converging technologies -- digitization, chip design, compression & data storage, telecommunications, fiberoptic cable, satellites and computers -- combined to create a new means of ubiquitous distribution of digitized information and communication.

Most new technologies for information and communication (telephones, television, fax machines, VCRs, ATMs, cell phones and electronic money) have required a 15+ year emergence and convergence curve before they changed human interaction, following a slow adoption curve moving from big business to small business to the consumer market over time. Often these technologies were adopted by the consumer for uses not planned in their positioning.

ATMs were originally designed to promote electronic cash-less banking transactions (what we now call on-line banking). Instead, 20 years later they are still used primarily as cash machines. VCRs were first designed only to play the movie studios' videotaped films. The addition of the Record button was nearly an afterthought. Now VCRs are used as often to timeshift television programming as to watch videotaped films.

Since 1980, the personal computer has moved from the innovators' home-built kit to networked business machines, to small business computers, to a home machine that is plug & play, mass-market priced, broadly distributed, and a basic component of the education of our school children. The PC in the home and business has reached critical mass, dynamically changing our access to information and our ease of communication. Even now, the changes triggered by powerful and inexpensive personal computers are not yet fully understood.

The Internet for 20 years was solely the domain of academia, government and the military to exchange and synergize research information. New developments in the 90s for the indexing and exchange of data across different computer platforms, and new Internet GUIs called browsers have made this technology accessible -- an Internet for the rest of us. The Net has found another home on new, powerful PCs connected through the existing infrastructures of telephone, cable and satellite.

An emergence So now all of those decentralized digits are instantly available via the Internet to each individual, allowing unprecedented access to information, communication, community and commerce. How high the stakes are -- for nodes on the Net, equality of access, pioneering empire builders and a soaring stock market!

The power of this change is reflected in the breadth of the market opportunity created by this intersection of technologies: the Internet allows connection between business to business, business to consumer and consumer to consumer. And for the first time it is bi-directional, allowing consumer to business interaction in a feedback loop. Never before has the timing of computer technology evolved to open all those markets at the same time. Worldwide telecommunications infrastructures and computer distribution networks allow international markets to participate now, without waiting for their terrestrial infrastructures to be built.

The stock market's reaction is clear: we are seeing only the beginning of this economic and social potential. Each piece that came before was but a component of the whole: A digit. A computer. Compression and storage technologies. Phone, cable and satellite infrastructures. PCs on every desk. A browser. And now an Internet put to new use: to connect it all. Wave after wave-the momentum of 20 years of waves: a sea change